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Everyone is saying it. At least everyone who’s facing their senior years. It’s celebrated on birthday cards, proclaimed on memes on social media, and it comes in a variety of presentations. “50 is the new 40!” “60 is the new 50!” and so on.

But a few researchers are out to prove it, though not for the same reasons as the rest of us. One of them, a seventy-four-year-old professor of economics and history at Stony Brook University in New York hopes his population aging research will change the way the world thinks about aging, and specifically how legislators, institutions and organizations formulate policies that affect all of us.

Population aging is defined as when the median age rises in a country because of increasing life expectancy and lower fertility rates.

Sanderson’s, Scherbov's and IIASA’s findings provide options to policymakers to shape the future of a changing world. “Population aging is a major force reshaping economies and societies,” he said. “New characteristic-based measures, developed at IIASA, provide a more accurate assessment of the challenges of population aging and the effects of policies to overcome them.”

Sanderson’s most recent research includes probabilistic population forecasting or measuring aging in ways that take life expectancy change into account and the effects of education and other demographic changes on economic growth. He said population aging is a concern for countries because of the perception that it leads to declining numbers of working age people as well as additional social burdens.

Sanderson insists that conventional measures of aging have seen their day, and he is working on the research to prove it. “The populations of most countries are aging. This change presents societies with challenges both for public institutions and private entities,” he wrote in a policy brief for IIASA. “Tackling this requires a new approach, because conventional measures of aging are outdated, misleading, and do not take spatial and temporal variations in the characteristics of people into account. Taking the changing characteristics of groups of people, such as life expectancy and cognitive functioning into account allows the construction of new, multidimensional measures of aging. These new measures provide novel perspectives on important policy questions.”

In other words, we may not be as old as we think, we all—both cultures and individuals—age differently and at different rates and most notably, the government and others need to recognize it when defining us.

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Using United Nations data, Sanderson is attempting to redefine when people get old and get the powers that be to recognize it in their policies. “The old-age threshold of 60 or 65 are inconsistent with the new reality in which people are living longer and healthier. A better alternative is to define the onset of old age based on characteristics such as remaining life expectancy,” he said.

Sanderson’s and Scherbov’s new study published in PLOS uses new measures of aging with probabilistic projections from the United Nations to scientifically illustrate that one’s actual age is not necessarily the best measure of human aging itself, but rather aging should be based on the number of years people are likely to live in a given country in the 21st Century.

According to an article in Stony Brook Matters, the study predicts an end to population aging in USA, Germany and China before end of the 21st Century. “It is a virtual certainty that population aging will come to an end in China, Germany and the U.S. well before the end of the century,” Sanderson said in the story. "Because people are generally healthier, more active and productive with better cognition at older ages today, countries can and should adjust public policies appropriately as to population aging."

Stony Brook Matters reported that in the last decade, “IIASA researchers have published a large body of research showing that the very boundary of ‘old age’ should shift with changes in life expectancy, and have introduced new measures of aging that are based on population characteristics, giving a more comprehensive view of population aging.”

The study combines these new measures with UN probabilistic population projections to produce a new set of age structure projections for four countries: China, Germany, Iran, and the USA. Sanderson said researchers chose these four countries for analysis “because they have very different population structures and projections, and so they allow us to test this methodology across a range of possible scenarios.”

Sanderson said the measures “give us a very different, and more nuanced picture of what the future of aging might look like.” He said one of the measures looks at life expectancy as well as years lived to adjust the definition of old age. Probabilistic projections include a range of thousands of potential scenarios, so that they can show a range of possibilities of aging outcomes, he said.

“For China, Germany, and the USA, the study showed that population aging would peak and begin declining well before the end of the century,” Stony Brook Matters reported. “Iran, which had an extremely rapid fall in fertility rate in the last 20 years, has an unstable age distribution and the results for the country were highly uncertain.”

Sanderson said the most widely used measure of aging—the old-age dependency ratio—overestimates the consequences of aging.

According to The Economist, the old-age dependency ratio measures the number of elderly people as a share of those of working age.

“Our idea is that people should not be considered old based on the number of birthdays they’ve had. Your age in our view should be adjusted in relation to how many years you have left to live,” Sanderson said. “What’s important in aging is how we function not how many birthdays we’ve had. So we have developed a new set of measures of aging that adjusts for changes in life expectancy.”

Sanderson said these measures of aging are as different for other cultures as they are for individuals. “So a man in Russia may be nearing the end of his life at 55 years old, where a man in Sweden may be nearing the end of his life at 75 years old,” he said.

He challenges people to consider a man in his seventies today hiking in the Himalayan Mountains. Fifty years ago he may not have been able to because of cataracts that couldn’t be fixed at that time or a worn out hip that today could be replaced. And yet our definitions of terms such as aging, elderly and mid-life have not changed in over eight decades. A 70-year-old today stands to live a lot longer than a 70-year-old 50 years ago.

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According to the United States Social Security Administration (SSA), the earliest a person can start receiving Social Security retirement benefits is age 62. In 1983, the SSA phased in a gradual increase in the age for collecting full Social Security retirement benefits. “The retirement age is increasing from 65 to 67 over a 22-year period, with an 11-year hiatus at which the retirement age will remain at 66,” the SSA official website states. The site offers a Retirement Planner that tells you how to qualify for Social Security benefits as well as a Retirement Estimator and Benefit Calculators.

The original Social Security Act of 1935 set the minimum age for receiving full retirement benefits at 65. At the time, Congress cited improvements in the health of older people and increases in average life expectancy as primary reasons for increasing the normal retirement age. According to the SSA, “Since the program first began paying monthly Social Security benefits in 1940, the average life expectancy for men reaching age 65 has increased nearly 7 years to age 84.3, for women reaching age 65, their average life expectancy has increased nearly 7 years to age 86.6.”

This is why Sanderson wants attitudes and thus policies to change. “When you adjust age for how many years people have left to live, you get a more comparable reading on how people function,” Sanderson said. “If you want to say aging depends on health, you can make a rough measure on people’s health based on their death rates. We should say that people who have the same death rates are similar and should have the same age not that people who have the same number of years should have the same health and death rates. Think about age in terms of life expectancy. Maybe we consider the 55-year-old Russian and the 75-year-old Swede as the same rather than the 55-year-old Russian and the 55-year-old Swede.” Sanderson calls this the “Characteristics Approach.”

"Traditional measures for aging have been in use for many decades. They are widely applied by interested parties from scientists to politicians and are used in many national and international organizations. These measures provide the fundamental inputs into the analysis of population aging and into other related fields," Sanderson wrote in his IIASA Interim Report, The Characteristics Approach to the Measurement of Population Aging. "Because they do not take into account changes in people's characteristics such as improvements in life expectancy and health, these measures are becoming increasingly inappropriate for both scientific and policy analysis. There is now an emerging new paradigm that considers multiple characteristics of people including, but not limited to, their chronological age."

Sanderson said when we consider aging in light of the Characteristics Approach, we realize that the measures of aging used by the U.S. Census Bureau, the World Bank, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the United Nations are not accurately representing aging people around the world. “These organizations by their policies and literature say people are old at 65. When you look at 1,000 different articles about aging, they all say people get old at 65. This gives policy-makers the wrong ideas about what they need to do. We have to have new policies in place appropriate for 65-year-olds of today.”

For example, Sanderson said, many countries set mandatory retirement ages at 65 that force people to retire when they are cognitively and physically able to continue working. “Intergenerationally fair normal pension ages can be computed using the Characteristics Approach, and they ensure that the balance of pension contributions and receipts is the same for each generation, and that pension systems are flexible enough to adapt to changes,” he said.

According to Sanderson, outdated or inapproriate guidelines and policies can also affect people psychologically. “You’re giving people hints as to when they should consider themselves old,” Sanderson said. “If you tell people they are old at 65, they begin to act as if they’re old. If you give signals to your people that they are old at 65, at 55 they are planning a life of being old at 65. They don’t get the full benefit of the human resources in their country and you are doing a disservice to your citizens. So it’s very important for policy-makers to formulate policies on the capabilities of the people in their countries, not just their ages. You ought to be told that you ought to behave like a younger person.”

Sanderson said increasing labor force participation rates by reducing barriers for those who want to work would allow a slower rise in legal pension ages, without increasing the burden of supporting non-working adults. “The United States government tells us our official pension age is 65 or 66. Soon it will be 67. We don’t know our life expectancy on an individual level; we know it on a group level. That’s how insurance companies make their money. In Sweden there is no pension age. You can take your pension at any age. You can take it at 64 based on your life expectancy at 64.”

These government statistical agencies essentially “tell us how old we are. On the UN website, there are forecasts that can tell you the life expectancy of a 60-year-old in Albania. They tell us how many years that 60-year-old has left to live on average, though that 60-year-old could drop dead tomorrow or live to be 110,” he said. “This allows the insurance companies to make their money and adjust their premiums accordingly.”

Sanderson and Scherbov have been working on changing how people think about age and aging for over a decade. “I want to change the way people think about aging. I want them to stop thinking in terms of how many years they have lived and start thinking about the future in terms of how many years they have left to live.”

Changing the way we think about aging has enormous implications on how we live our lives now, but these effects could and should really begin when we’re young. “Would you decide to take a year off after college if you thought your life was going to be longer?” Sanderson poses this question and others. “Would you have children later because you thought you would be living longer with them? Would you get married later? All of these things could change because you’re going to be living longer.”

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At 74, Sanderson said with the Characteristics Approach, he would set his own age at around 60. “I work full time. I’m not the type to retire at age 65. I enjoy life as it comes. I behave like someone in the past did at age 60.”

He said he’s not naïve. He knows he is not chronologically 60 and doesn’t expect anyone to change any documents to reflect his true chronological age or stop asking him how old he is. “I don’t think realistically we will ever not say how old we are,” Sanderson said, “but instead of asking how old someone is, maybe we ask them what they are doing with their lives. Is he hiking in the Himalayas? Maybe we think of ourselves as being old based on how we function. Older people are different today than they used to be and we have to think about that.”

I was the girl who stayed at grandma’s table after the others went out to play. I relished stories like grandpa’s tale of the American Indian woman who was laid to rest…

I was the girl who stayed at grandma’s table after the others went out to play. I relished stories like grandpa’s tale of the American Indian woman who was laid to rest along the Santa Fe Trail in Kansas in an area that would become his front yard. I grew to become the young reporter who covered health and senior issues for the St. Charles bureau of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Much of my professional life has been recognizing and reporting the richness of the stories older adults have to tell and the gravity of their counsel. I have covered news and features in science, medical, financial, business, and lifestyle writing for International Medical News Group IMNG (now Frontline Medical Communications), Feaststl.com, EveryDayHealth.com, HealthDay.com, StreetScape Magazine, St. Charles Business Magazine, Patch.com, St. Charles County Business Record and others. I write the stories of people’s lives, so others know they lived. Follow me on Twitter at https://twitter.com/SeatonJefferson or email me at rsjreporter@charter.net.